arXiv subjects

Muhammad Shahid Iqbal Malik

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad Shahid Iqbal Malik.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

An Explainable System for Offensive Content Detection in Nastaliq Urdu: Corpus Curation, Transformer Benchmarking, and Word-Level Attribution

Automated moderation systems are deployed at scale, yet they remain opaque to the users and moderators affected by their decisions, and their coverage is almost entirely confined to English. For Urdu written in the Nastaliq script, no such system exists, and the annotated resources it would be built on are drawn largely from Twitter/X, where character limits constrain how users write. Interpretability has received little attention, leaving it unclear what such models actually learn. This study addresses these gaps in three steps. First, we curate and publicly release a corpus of 7604 Nastaliq Urdu Facebook comments, extending an earlier corpus by correcting text-level inconsistencies and re-examining the original labels. Second, we fine-tune four Urdu-capable transformers under a common grid-search protocol and compare them against twelve feature-classifier baselines on identical data partitions. The best configuration, Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL), reaches 87.05% accuracy and 87.06% macro F1, improving on the strongest baseline by 5.52 percentage points, a margin that exceeds the 95% confidence interval on test accuracy; the two leading transformers differ by less than the test set can resolve, and performance is stable across five optimizers. Third, we compute word-level SHAP attributions adapted to right-to-left rendering. Attribution mass concentrates on high-frequency slurs but extends to syntactically neutral function words and to political vocabulary characteristic of the source pages, indicating that aggregate performance may rest partly on lexical and topical regularities rather than a generalizable representation of offensiveness.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

When Explanations Cannot Be Read: Measuring and Correcting SHAP and LIME Rendering for Right-to-Left Languages

Post hoc explanation methods such as SHAP and LIME are widely used to interpret text classifiers, but their visualizations are mainly designed for left-to-right languages. When applied to right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew, the attribution values remain mathematically valid, while their visual presentation fails. Tokens appear out of sequence, connected letterforms break apart, and plot layouts do not follow the natural reading direction. This study addresses this gap as a visualization problem rather than a limitation of the explanation methods themselves. We present SHAP-RTL, a rendering layer that corrects reading direction and script shaping in SHAP and LIME visualizations, with per-language font selection, while preserving the original attribution values, feature ordering, and model outputs. The approach is evaluated on Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian hate and offensive-language datasets using TF-IDF and logistic regression classifiers. Rendering correctness is measured by an OCR round trip over 200 feature words per language. Default rendering yields character error rates of 0.820 to 0.979, meaning the label no longer carries its token; the common reshape-and-reorder workaround fails for Urdu at 0.998, worse than no correction; and the Matplotlib 3.11.0 text rewrite inverts that workaround, while SHAP-RTL remains correct under both versions. The framework also verbalizes the same attributions as short contextual explanations in the reader's language, constrained to the identified features. Evaluation in this paper concerns rendering correctness; assessment of the generated explanations is left to future work. The study highlights the importance of language-aware visualization in making post hoc explainability more accessible across different writing systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

An Explainable DistilBERT-BiLSTM-Attention Framework for Binary and Multi-Class Hate Speech Detection

Hate speech on social media poses serious risks to social harmony, mental well-being, and public safety, making its timely and accurate detection essential for content moderation systems. Most existing studies focus on binary classification, evaluated their frameworks on a single dataset, and provide limited insight into how decisions are made, which limits their real-world applicability. In addition, limited work is done on the explainability of their predictive inference. To address these challenges, this study proposes a multilevel and explainable hate speech detection framework. The proposed model integrates DistilBERT (Distilled Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) embeddings with a Bi-LSTM (Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) model, and an attention mechanism to capture both contextual meaning and sequential dependencies in text. To enhance trust and transparency, LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) is employed to explain model predictions by highlighting influential textual features. The framework is evaluated on two benchmark datasets using both binary and multi-class classification to examine robustness and generalization. In addition, an ablation study is presented to highlight the significance of various components of proposed framework. For binary classification, the proposed model achieves F1-scores of 96.78% on the Davidson dataset and 99.53% on the SMHS dataset. In the multi-class setting, it attains F1-scores of 97.00% and 94.99% on the Davidson and SMHS datasets, respectively, outperforming existing baseline approaches. The results demonstrate that multilevel evaluation improves the reliability that the proposed framework effectively balances performance and efficiency. This makes the framework suitable for practical hate speech moderation systems that require accurate, generalizable, and explainable decisions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Transformer-based classification of user queries for medical consultancy with respect to expert specialization

The need for skilled medical support is growing in the era of digital healthcare. This research presents an innovative strategy, utilizing the RuBERT model, for categorizing user inquiries in the field of medical consultation with a focus on expert specialization. By harnessing the capabilities of transformers, we fine-tuned the pre-trained RuBERT model on a varied dataset, which facilitates precise correspondence between queries and particular medical specialisms. Using a comprehensive dataset, we have demonstrated our approach's superior performance with an F1-score of over 92%, calculated through both cross-validation and the traditional split of test and train datasets. Our approach has shown excellent generalization across medical domains such as cardiology, neurology and dermatology. This methodology provides practical benefits by directing users to appropriate specialists for prompt and targeted medical advice. It also enhances healthcare system efficiency, reduces practitioner burden, and improves patient care quality. In summary, our suggested strategy facilitates the attainment of specific medical knowledge, offering prompt and precise advice within the digital healthcare field.

cs.LG↗